Successful blog writing can be compared to fine cooking techniques. With the right ingredients, your blog can stand out from the crowd. Blogs are a very effective search engine optimization (SEO) tool as well as a way to keep your clients up to date. With so many blogs online, here’s how you differentiate your blog writing.

Make an outline before blog writing

Think about your blog even before you sit down to write it. Unless you organise your thoughts, you cannot accomplish the task of writing a structured blog. From the time the idea first comes to mind to the time you complete your blog writing, the process could take several days. Spending more time planning your blog will save time as you progress.

Remember, the idea of your blog writing is not to phrase few scattered sentences and compose paragraphs that don’t read well. When your blog is structured properly, it will have the right flow to keep the reader focused. Here are a few tips to make this happen:

Make a rough draft of your blog to ensure that you are staying on topic and avoiding tangents.
Research your topic well before you start as you may not be familiar with the subject matter.
Avoid glaring errors – fact checking is vital.

Create an attention-grabbing headline when blog writing

Every blogger knows that a catchy and attractive headline for his or her blog is an important tool to attract traffic. According to Copyblogger, just 20% of the people who visit your blog read the text while the remaining 80% just scan the headline. So great content with a bad headline is most likely to go unnoticed.

Opinions differ when it comes to choosing the headline. While some people feel a generic headline may bring in traffic, others feel specifics do a better job. We suggest a flexible approach that should vary depending on the topic of your blog.

You could follow either of the two basic techniques while writing a headline. The first approach is to write the heading first and then the write in line with the heading, while the other approach would be to do the blog writing, and then decide a heading for it.

Seasoned copywriters advocate spending half of the entire time taken to write a blog to decide on the heading. Some writers suggest that in the initial stages of writing, you should churn out at least 25 headlines for a topic and then choose the best.

A good headline assists the reader in deciding if he or she wants to continue reading or not. In spite of being an essential component of blog writing, the importance of a good headline when blog writing is not always appreciated.

Blog writing – the text

Now that you have made an outline for your blog and probably got a fix on the headline, it’s time to get down to writing the text. As in the case of headline writing, there are different approaches to writing the text as well. You can either write the text in one sitting or write by taking breaks in between.

However, you might be more productive when the blog writing is done in a single sitting as you are less likely to get distracted, will not miss important points, and will be able to maintain the flow. In addition, when you frequently go back to your writing, you are tempted to add more to the draft and soon you could get off track. Here are a few simple techniques to make your blog writing stand out:

Let your blog speak a different language. Don’t write what everyone is writing or copy and paste content from the web.
The longer your blog writing, the better it is for search indexing, sharing, and traffic. Your blog should be complete from the content point of view and convey the right message across.
Link your blog writing to other topics within your website. Ensure that the internal linking is relevant and of interest to the reader.
Copyedit and proofread your blog. Come back with a fresh pair of eyes, maybe even a day later. Editing is just not about deleting repetitive words or fixing grammatical errors. You need to look at your blog writing in its entirety and sometimes edit/delete entire paragraphs or make alterations to the very structure of your blog. Last but not the least, check for errors in spelling and punctuation.

Apart from the actual text, writing a good introduction is also an important aspect of blog writing. Sometimes, it could be difficult to write an introduction at the very beginning of writing a blog; in such cases, you can complete your text and write the introduction at the end.

Blog writing is no different from other skills that you acquire with practice; the more you write, the better you will get at it.

Intersperse your blog with images

Blog writing needs to be content rich but at the same time it should also be interesting for the reader. A well written blog that contains plain text may not attract traffic as readers often lack the time and resolve to concentrate on the text alone. Readers would love to look at visually appealing content while reading an interesting article. Usually, creative blogs are full of images that set an optimistic and exciting tone for the audience. To make your blog interesting, use stock images which can be purchased online. You can also find free images on sites such as Unsplash and Flickr after checking for image licences.

The benefits of using images include:

Enhancing the flow of your blog writing
Simplifying complex topics by using infographics, diagrams, and charts
Setting the tone and mood of your blog writing.

If you need assistance with your blog, we will be glad to discuss your goals and how we can assist with blog writing services.

If you want to improve the business writing skills of you or your staff, learn more about our Business Writing Course.